by Susan Sontag
Too abstract: death
Too concrete: me
For there was a middle term, both abstract and concrete: women. I am a woman. And thereby, a whole new universe of death rose before my eyes.
I am not trying to control my own death.
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All my life I have been thinking about death, + it is a subject I am now getting a little tired of. Not, I think, because I am closer to my own death—but because death has finally become real. (> Death of Susan [Taubes])
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Women and courage. Not courage to do, but courage to endure / suffer.
Wife of my grandfather’s brother Chaim—after the funeral she came home + put her head in the oven. Childhood image—kneeling down. But the oven is dirty.
Women + sleeping pills + water (not guns—[the twentieth-century French author Henry de] Montherlant, Hemingway)
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1975
[Otherwise undated entries, marked only 1975:]
Stocking one’s vocabulary—“Wortschatz,” “word treasury”—requires years, great effort, patience
Brecht’s “Plumpes Denken” [“crude thought”]—thought + language substantial enough to have its effect + not be overlooked.
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Jack London’s story “To Build a Fire”—read aloud to Lenin on his deathbed.
[The Russian critic and writer Vasily] Rozanov—another member of the [late-nineteenth-and-early-twentieth-century] Russian movement that includes [the Russian writer Nikolai] Berdyaev + [the Ukrainian-Russian author Lev] Shestov
Poets: Cyprian Kamil Norwid (Polish, 19th century, friend of Chopin)
Vladimír Holan [the twentieth-century Czech poet]
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“This book is like a sophisticated rocket w[ith] an obsolete warhead.” (beginning of a review in the TLS [Times Literary Supplement])
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Floyd Collins, who was trapped in a landslide in 1925—in a cave in central Kentucky—and perished in slow motion, with much of the world following by radio, newsreel, and newspapers.
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“One photographs things in order to get them out of one’s mind.”—Kafka
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3/15/75 Haramont
Paul [Thek]: “not to try to be better than other people. Try to be better than myself.”
Brother Lawrence:—Born Nicolas Herman in French Lorraine—served briefly as footman + soldier, became a Lay brother among the barefooted Carmelites in Paris in 1666 (known after that as “Brother Lawrence”)—worked in a monastery kitchen; died age 80
His conversion, at 18, was the result of the sight on a midwinter day of a dry and leafless tree standing in the snow, which stirred thoughts of the change the coming spring would bring
Cf. Chestnut tree in Sartre’s La Nausée
Barthes now working on “le langage amoureux”—[Goethe’s Sorrows of Young] Werther, opera texts
Photograph of Nietzsche and his mother taken in 1892—he was 48 [This image was on the inside cover of the notebook begun in March 1975.]
(3 years after collapse in Turin in 1889)—he looks at his mother, who holds his arm; she looks into the camera
Radio Play [SS was collaborating with the Argentine writer and filmmaker Edgardo Cozarinsky on this project]:
Career of Eva Perón as radio actress
Programs she did—great women in history (Jeanne d’Arc, Florence Nightingale, Mme Chiang Kai-shek)
Her mother
Ends with her being introduced to Perón (then a colonel) at a benefit given for flood victims in San Juan (the north)
Rivalry with another actress, a star of radio at the time, also named Eva
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3/17/75
Consider the image of homosexuals in films where that is being subliminally suggested while at the same time being contradicted: for example, many of the roles of Clifton Webb, Edward Everett Horton, and George Sanders in films of the 30s and 40s. Seeing Preminger’s Laura (1944) again, I was struck by the fact that the character played by Webb (who turns out to be the murderer) is clearly the portrait of a homosexual: sarcastic, cold, elegant, worldly, smart, an aesthete and art collector.
[Marked only as “Note from May 1975.”]
Problematic essays from the 1960s for me—now—are “One Culture + The New Sensibility” and “On Style.” Reread them, rethink the problems.
I don’t want to go back on my public association with the new arts, the new politics. But how would I formulate those tastes / ideas today?
Sensibility vs morality?
Not that I have changed my point of view. Objective conditions have changed.
My role: the intellectual as adversary. (So now, must I be adversary to myself??)
In the early 1960s, the going ideas were conformity, middlebrow culture, certain kinds of inhibitions. So the aesthetic positions I took were good + necessary. Also, when the focus of political activity was (rightly) against the government + the war—the role of political adversary was right, indeed inevitable, if one had a conscience.
But, in the early 1970s, when the abuse is quite different—abuse of ideas of liberation. Now, ideas which came out of specific situations [of the 1960s] are junior high school norms … What status do those ideas have?
Genius of American capitalism is that anything that becomes known in this country becomes assimilated.
I was never taken in by the politics (pretensions to revolutionary potential) of the counter-culture. In the Cuban piece (1967) I already warned against that.
—political mistake of the New Left (ca. 1967) was to think you could invent gestures (styles, clothes, habits) that would really divide people. Like: long hair, Navajo jewelry, health food, dope, bell-bottomed trousers.
5/16/75 NYC
One has the feeling of having lived through an old script. Fellow-travellers of other people’s revolutions: French, Russian, Chinese, Cuban, Vietnamese.
Cf. [the American social critic Christopher] Lasch’s book, The American Liberals and the Russian Revolution.
Perhaps for the last time? “Right” and “left” are tired words.
The Movement harbored at least three different tendencies: the liberal one, the anarchist, and the radical one. And the radical one has as many themes in common with the extreme right as with the extreme left—so much that is New Left / gauchiste rhetoric being indistinguishable from fascist rhetoric of the 20s and early 30s, as so much that is right-wing (e.g. [then Alabama governor George] Wallace) sounds like potential left-wing populism.
Intellectuals played at crusaders and revolutionaries only to discover they were still patricians and liberals. (As kids played at being urban guerrillas and settled for being punks.) “Liberalism” seems a vast, obscure, swampy territory one never emerges from, no matter how one tries—and perhaps never should.
It is from liberalism that one gets one’s passion for justice—and that longing for a juster order in which those freedoms guaranteed by liberalism probably couldn’t survive. The problem with liberalism is that it can never have an unambivalent attitude toward revolutions. Finally, it must take a counterrevolutionary position. (The Maoists are correct.) Liberals can, ought to, support the right of national self-determination (the right of other peoples to have civil wars and make revolutions) and oppose our government’s slaughtering them. But liberals can’t survive under these governments—as we know from the history of every Communist regime, without exception, that has taken power.
To be an intellectual is to be attached to the inherent value of plurality, and to the right of critical space (space for critical opposition within society). Therefore, to be an intellectual supporting a revolutionary movement is to be assenting to one’s own abolition. That’s an arguable position: there is a good case to be made out that intellectuals are a luxury, and have no role in the only societies possible in the future. Cf. [the American economist Robert] Heilbroner.
But most intellectuals don’t want to go that far, and wil
l retreat from revolutionary fellow-travelling. Cf.: Lasch book; [the American editor and writer Melvin] Lasky on English reactions to the French revolution.
The phenomenon of revolutionary tourism—cf. [the German writer Hans Magnus] Enzensberger essay
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Franz Hubmann, The Jewish Family Album (London: Routledge, 1975) 400 photographs
Writing at full voice
Paracelsus (1493?–1541)
5/20/75
… Already in Dostoyevsky, Notes from Underground—literary space, the narrative that can’t finish, that could go on forever, that is potentially interminable
Cf. [the German-American political philosopher and historian Eric] Voegelin comment to his Henry James letter in the Southern Review
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(Bob S[ilvers]:) The dense thicket of intuitions about people in Faulkner’s novels
Cf. Bellow, who has not, for all his talents, craft, intelligence, produced a great body of work
5/21/75
My subject in all the fiction I’ve written, from The Benefactor on: the fiction of thought. The relation between thinking and power. That is, various forms of oppression and repression and liberation … I can’t think of anyone else who has treated this subject fully, as fiction. Beckett, somewhat.
Conversation with Joe [Chaikin] tonight. When he thinks about the theatre, he said, he can’t think of any reason to work in it, any meaning to what he’s doing. Only when he doesn’t think about it (i.e. ask himself the question about the meaning, value, importance of his work) can he enjoy the work—and he does. I replied that when one asks oneself a question for a long time without ever getting a satisfactory answer, there is usually something wrong with the question (rather than the answer). One didn’t—until the late 19th century—ask for art to justify itself, to manifest its meaning. That was like asking art to be useful, practical. I made the distinction between activities which were slavish, practical—one knows why one performs them: they’re useful, necessary, obligatory—and activities which were free, voluntary, gratuitous. If practicing an art belongs in the second type of activity, and that is what draws us to the arts, then it would seem a kind of mistake to be restless and demoralized because we were subsequently unable to justify that activity, because that activity failed to justify itself as belonging to the first type of activity. We would be in the situation of doubting the value (worth) of our activity—work—because of the very quality that drew us to it in the first place: its gratuitousness.
(Cf. Valéry—vagueness is not only the condition of literature, but of any life of the mind. “But perhaps vagueness is indestructible, its existence necessary to psychic effulgence.”)
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5/22/75
Kafka on Tolstoy’s Resurrection: “You cannot write about salvation, you can only live it.”
I want to write a Moby Dick of thought. Melville is right: One needs a great subject.
Intelligence—beyond a certain point—is a liability to the artist. Leonardo da Vinci and Duchamp were too intelligent to be painters. They saw through it … And Valéry was too intelligent to be a poet.
A novel about the Jews: Sabbatai Zevi, Portnoy, Hyman Kaplan, Anne Frank, Mickey Cohen, Marx, Ethel + Julius Rosenberg, Trotsky, Heine, Erich von Stroheim, Gertrude Stein, Walter Benjamin, Fanny Brice, Kafka
5/25/75
… I must change my life. But how can I change my life when I have a broken back?
D[avid] said he wasn’t fooled by my relentless cheerfulness—from the moment I wake up until the second I fall asleep—over the past two years. I read your fiction, he said. Nobody who wrote those stories could be that cheerful, genuinely.
But I don’t want to fail, I said. I want to be one of the survivors. I don’t want to be Susan Taubes. (Or Alfred [Chester]. Or Diane Arbus [the American photographer who committed suicide in 1971].) I read aloud [to David] the passage from Kafka—his summary [July 21, 1913] for and against his marriage …
I feel like Kafka, I said to D., but I’ve found a system of safe harbors, to ward off terror—to resist, to survive.
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I’ve constructed a life in which I can’ t be profoundly distressed or upset by anyone—except by D., of course. Nobody (except him) can get to me, get into my guts, topple me over the precipice. Everybody is certified “safe.” The jewel and centerpiece of this system: Nicole.
I’m safe, yes, but I’m getting even weaker. I have more and more difficulty being alone, even for a few hours.—My panic on Saturdays this winter in Paris, when N[icole] leaves at 11 in the morning for the hunt and doesn’t come back until after midnight. My inability to leave the rue de la Faisanderie [where Nicole Stéphane then lived] and go around Paris alone. I just stay there, those Saturdays, unable to work, unable to move …
The shadow of Carlotta panics me—most of all—because I don’t want anything to make waves. I dread being in a state of conflict. Everything I do is designed to avoid conflict.
The price: no sex, a life devoted to work, to D., to my flagship N., and to bland maternalistic friendships (Joe [Chaikin], Barbara [Lawrence], Stephen [Koch], Edgardo [Cozarinsky], Monique [Lange], Colette, etc.). Becalmed, observant, doggedly productive, prudent, cheerful, dishonest, helpful to others.
Do I really want to have the rest of my life devoted to protecting my “work”? I’ve turned my life into [a] workshop. I’m managing myself.
reminds me that the safe harbor isn’t going to be so safe for much longer. (N’s bankruptcy, the inevitability of selling the rue de la Faisanderie.) Then it will be even harder to change anything.—My taste for custodial relationships. Propensity first developed in relation to my mother. (Weak, unhappy, confused, charming women.) Another argument against resuming any sort of connection with C., whom I found so pathetic, deteriorated in Rome this March.
6/7/75
Two texts which put “modernism” in perspective: Voegelin on his letter to [Robert] Heilman 20 years earlier re [Henry James’s] The Turn of the Screw; Isaiah Berlin on Verdi (Hudson Review, 1968)
Talking about fascism, one thinks of the models of the past—the first half of this century (Italy, Germany, Spain, etc.). Most talk about the new variety of fascism that the second half of the century is spawning, which will be lighter, more efficient, less sentimental. Eco-fascism.
concern for a pure environment (air, water, etc.) will replace concern for a pure race; mobilize masses not on the basis of fighting racial pollution but of fighting environmental pollution
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6/12/75
Read, for the first time, [Mary Shelley’s] Frankenstein. Astonishing work by someone eighteen years old, much more astonishing than Radiguet [who wrote Le Diable au Corps before he was twenty].
It’s an “education novel”—the dilemma of “l’enfant sauvage” (cf. [the French filmmaker François] Truffaut’s L’E.S. [L’Enfant sauvage], Herzog’s Kaspar Hauser) …
Victor Frankenstein, far from being the mad baron of the [James] Whale films, is a petit bourgeois scientist— … and Genevan: Smug, complacent, cowardly, vain, self-congratulatory. The hero is the monster—someone driven crazy for lack of love.
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Theme of marriage + the family in [Goethe’s] Elective Affinities + Frankenstein.
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Life of [the twentieth-century French poet] Olivier Larronde—in Art & Literature, #10. His bedroom hung with astral maps. Monkey. Hermetic poems. Opium. Black curtains.